Luminous Airplanes (12 page)
In class I sat by the window, looked at the sky and thought about my invented world. My teachers were happy to let me go. I was quiet and as long as I did well on their tests and showed no signs of abusing alcohol or drugs, unlike August Waxman, who came to school one day with pupils the width of pencil leads and his shirt buttoned askew, and said,
Say what?
to every question, no matter how many times you asked it, Mr. Fitch didn’t mind if I slumped forward in my chair, and Mrs. Booth let my unrolled French
r
pass without comment. Only Mr. Savage, who taught American history, still wanted something from me. “You asleep?” he shouted when I rested my head against the wall. “Wake up, we’re making history here!” He called on me to answer questions, and embarrassed me when I didn’t know the answers, oblivious to the rolling eyes of my classmates, who had seen me embarrassed so many times that they could take only a moderate pleasure from it. Mr. Savage didn’t know this. He was a new teacher who had come to Nederland the year before from a public school in Detroit. He was short and dark, with menacing eyebrows and a five-o’clock shadow that was in full bloom by one-fifteen, and he dressed like a plumber at a funeral. Mr. Savage had made the mistake of telling last year’s American history class that he had a black belt in jujitsu, and could flip someone twice his weight. Now, when he bored us, Ronald Kaplan would raise his hand and ask, “Um, is it hard to learn jujitsu?” And when one of us misbehaved, the others would shout, “Flip him! Flip him!” Mr. Savage was not amused. “Violence is serious,” he said, the first week of American history. “If you learn only one thing this year, it should be that violence is serious.”
Violence is serious
, I wrote in my notebook; then I stopped listening again.
Say what?
to every question, no matter how many times you asked it, Mr. Fitch didn’t mind if I slumped forward in my chair, and Mrs. Booth let my unrolled French
r
pass without comment. Only Mr. Savage, who taught American history, still wanted something from me. “You asleep?” he shouted when I rested my head against the wall. “Wake up, we’re making history here!” He called on me to answer questions, and embarrassed me when I didn’t know the answers, oblivious to the rolling eyes of my classmates, who had seen me embarrassed so many times that they could take only a moderate pleasure from it. Mr. Savage didn’t know this. He was a new teacher who had come to Nederland the year before from a public school in Detroit. He was short and dark, with menacing eyebrows and a five-o’clock shadow that was in full bloom by one-fifteen, and he dressed like a plumber at a funeral. Mr. Savage had made the mistake of telling last year’s American history class that he had a black belt in jujitsu, and could flip someone twice his weight. Now, when he bored us, Ronald Kaplan would raise his hand and ask, “Um, is it hard to learn jujitsu?” And when one of us misbehaved, the others would shout, “Flip him! Flip him!” Mr. Savage was not amused. “Violence is serious,” he said, the first week of American history. “If you learn only one thing this year, it should be that violence is serious.”
Violence is serious
, I wrote in my notebook; then I stopped listening again.
“Hey! How’s the weather?” Mr. Savage called to me.
I opened my eyes. “Partly cloudy.”
“You think it’s going to rain?”
I looked at the sky. Low lumpy clouds grazed the spire of the chapel, the black weathervane with a figure of a Dutchman atop it, the school’s emblem. “It might.”
“No chance,” said Mr. Savage. “Those are stratocumulus clouds. You never get rain from stratocumulus.”
He continued the lesson as if this checking of the weather were an ordinary event. Gideon Peel looked at me and rolled his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he meant that I was an asshole for not knowing that stratocumulus clouds were not rain-bearing, or that Mr. Savage was crazy for telling me so. I rolled my eyes back and returned to the window.
Mr. Savage stopped me as I was leaving class. “Why don’t you come with me?” he said. He led me to one of the small rooms, furnished with a coffee warmer, some vinyl chairs and a strong sour smell, where the teachers lived. He asked if I wanted coffee, I said no. “You aren’t paying attention,” said Mr. Savage. “You don’t notice anything. It’s like you’re living on another planet.” How close you are to the truth, I thought. “Are you like this in all your classes?”
“Yes.” It was the truth, and besides he was a decent person and I didn’t want him to think I found his class any less interesting than the others.
“What is it? What do you think about?” I wanted to tell him about the game, but it would have been too humiliating to confess that I was consumed by a project I didn’t have any idea how to do and would probably never figure out. The secret of it was all I had; if I told him I would have nothing. “Are you thinking about girls? I could understand that,” Mr. Savage said. “I think it’s terrible that you don’t have girls here. You’re like”—he waved his hand again—“you’re like astronauts, on some space station up in orbit.” He shifted his jacket, which was, I saw, too small for him; in another life he could have been an athlete, or a bouncer. I was afraid that he would pick me up by the lapels of my jacket, lean his stubbled face to mine and whisper threats featuring the word
youse
, even though there was only one of me. I giggled. “Astronauts, it’s funny, right? But you have to learn how to live on earth.” Mr. Savage struck his knee with his fist. “Help me,” he said. “If there was one thing you wanted to learn, something you really wanted to know, what would it be?”
youse
, even though there was only one of me. I giggled. “Astronauts, it’s funny, right? But you have to learn how to live on earth.” Mr. Savage struck his knee with his fist. “Help me,” he said. “If there was one thing you wanted to learn, something you really wanted to know, what would it be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Anything,” said Mr. Savage. “Just one thing you want to know.”
I looked at the coffeepot. “Maybe the discovery of America.” It came into my mind because of what Charles had told me.
“Really?” said Mr. Savage. “Who discovered America?”
“Columbus or Leif Eriksson,” I said. “We had it in world history last year.”
“But you’re not convinced, is that right?”
“I guess.”
“Good.” Mr. Savage tapped my breastbone with a thick finger. “That’s a good place to begin.”
The next day, Mr. Savage asked how many of us had read Plato’s
Timaeus
. Not a hand went up. “In that dialogue,” Mr. Savage said, “Critias tells Socrates a story that comes from the priests at Thebes, which is where? Andrew, yes. Egypt. Thebes is the oldest city in Egypt, which is quite possibly the oldest nation in the world. The priests at Thebes told a story which was already thousands of years old, about a land to the west of the western ocean, which they called Atlantis.” He wrote ATLANTIS on the blackboard. “Anyone heard of it?” So we embarked on the discovery of America, the discovery of the discovery of America. Strange facts were coming to light in Mr. Savage’s sixth-period class, stories about seafarers and prevailing winds, about the climate in Greenland and the Gulf Stream, about carved stones and burial mounds. For a week, it couldn’t have been more than a week, we studied the people who might have discovered America, not only the Vikings, but the Phoenicians, the Basques, the Chinese; there was a story that Welshmen had been the first Europeans to arrive in North America, so we learned about that. Mr. Savage spared us nothing, not even the story that the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the proof of which was that the Jews, like the Indians, once lived in tents, that both races had been known to anoint themselves with oil and that the Indians did not eat pork, or at least some of them didn’t.
Timaeus
. Not a hand went up. “In that dialogue,” Mr. Savage said, “Critias tells Socrates a story that comes from the priests at Thebes, which is where? Andrew, yes. Egypt. Thebes is the oldest city in Egypt, which is quite possibly the oldest nation in the world. The priests at Thebes told a story which was already thousands of years old, about a land to the west of the western ocean, which they called Atlantis.” He wrote ATLANTIS on the blackboard. “Anyone heard of it?” So we embarked on the discovery of America, the discovery of the discovery of America. Strange facts were coming to light in Mr. Savage’s sixth-period class, stories about seafarers and prevailing winds, about the climate in Greenland and the Gulf Stream, about carved stones and burial mounds. For a week, it couldn’t have been more than a week, we studied the people who might have discovered America, not only the Vikings, but the Phoenicians, the Basques, the Chinese; there was a story that Welshmen had been the first Europeans to arrive in North America, so we learned about that. Mr. Savage spared us nothing, not even the story that the Indians were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, the proof of which was that the Jews, like the Indians, once lived in tents, that both races had been known to anoint themselves with oil and that the Indians did not eat pork, or at least some of them didn’t.
Our textbook had nothing to say on these subjects, so Mr. Savage photocopied the maps drawn by people who had seen much, a little or none of the New World, the fantastic maps that show California as a peninsula the size of all the rest of North America, the maps that stocked the interior with lions, serpents, dragons and gold. “Why gold? Matt, yes. Good, yes, so that people would keep exploring.” We kept exploring. Mr. Savage talked about cannibals, about how each tribe the Europeans met reported that there was another tribe, over there, who ate human flesh. “Anyone want to draw any conclusions? Andrew, yes.”
Reactions to the unit, which put us a week behind the other section of American history, taught by Mr. Rye, a very tall man with yellow teeth, were mixed.
“Man is crazy,” said Gideon Peel after the first class. “He smoke too much weed.”
“He is a disciple of the pipe,” Ronald Kaplan said. “His thoughts are unsound.”
David Metzger liked the idea that the Indians were from Israel. “Jews, yo!” He pumped his fist in the air. “You honkies can all get off our land!”
“Dude, even if the Indians were Jews, that doesn’t make us honkies,” said Gideon Peel.
“You are so a honky,” said Ronald Kaplan, whose father was Jewish.
“And besides, we did this last year. History is repeating itself, man.”
I kept quiet. There was no way I could have explained what I felt when I looked at the maps, how, running my finger over the big whiteness between the coasts, I went queasy with excitement, as though what Charles had told me was literally true, and my father was hidden somewhere on the map, a tiny black dot, not reproduced at this scale, but there all the same. As though, when I looked at the map, I was also, in some obscure, magical way, looking for him.
At the end of the week Mr. Savage divided us into groups, each of which had to make the case that a different people had discovered America. The group that made the most convincing argument would receive a pizza lunch. I was, with David Metzger, Andrew Ames and Matt Bark, the Chinese, not a good assignment. We met in the school library, where we found no books on the subject of the Chinese discovery of America, no mention of it, even.
“Well, so we make it up,” said Matt Bark.
“We can’t make it up, that’s plagiarism,” said David Metzger.
We argued about whether it was plagiarism if you were just lying, and concluded that it might be all right. But I held out for facts.
“There are no facts,” said Matt Bark.
“Just rock and roll,” said David Metzger.
“It’s not fair,” Andrew Ames said. “We should have got the Vikings.”
I said that I could probably find some facts, and that afternoon I took the Broadway bus to the public library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street. It was the first time I’d ever gone there, and of course I wasn’t allowed in; only adults could enter the Reading Room. My first encounter with the library was an anticlimax; I was shunted to the Mid-Manhattan Library two blocks south, where men in smelly coats coughed in the fluorescent light. I leafed through a book on the Chinese navy, and another on ancient seafarers, and learned about the Polynesian islanders who navigated by means of knotted strings, an interesting subject but not one that convinced Matt Bark to change his plan.
“String, fuck, this isn’t a report on string.”
“But imagine, if the Chinese had these string maps …”
Matt put up his hand. “Shut up, weather boy.”
“Weather boy.” David Metzger laughed.
“You shut up,” I said.
No one acknowledged me. I slumped in my chair and closed my eyes. There was no use in fighting them; the facts were all on their side. How could I argue when I didn’t know what kind of clouds rained and what kinds didn’t?
On the appointed day, Gideon Peel reported to our class that archaeologists had found Norse houses in northern Newfoundland, dating from around the year 1000. If the Vikings hadn’t discovered America, he concluded, prudently, at least they’d been here before Columbus. John De Luca stumped for the Phoenicians, the first masters of the ocean; he described the Phoenician inscriptions found on rocks in Brazil, and also certain man-sized slabs of stone found in a cave in New Hampshire, which, he said, smiling, were probably sacrificial altars left behind by the Phoenician priests. John explained that the Phoenicians sacrificed human beings to the great god Baal, whose wrath could be appeased only by blood, so probably virgins had been tied to these New Hampshire slabs, and stabbed, and stabbed, with bronze daggers, which by the way people had also found in New England. When the harvest was bad, or the wind blew the wrong way, or someone was angry, whoa, human sacrifice! The blood of the virgins steamed on the cold stone, and John’s smile grew wider and wider, and the great god Baal too was pleased, because he was a god of war and destruction and he could drink
gallons
of blood …
gallons
of blood …
“OK, John, thanks,” Mr. Savage said.
John sat down heavily. Wayne Echeverria spoke briefly for the Basques, then Matt Bark gave our group’s report on a certain Admiral Ho, who was blown across the Pacific by a storm, and founded a Chinese colony on the California coast. The proof of it was that there was more Chinese food on the West Coast of America than there was on the East, not to mention the dish that was actually called Admiral Ho’s shrimp, which Matt Bark had eaten in Los Angeles and which was, he assured us, very tasty. And then there were the Chinese place names in America, for instance, San Francisc … ho! and San Dieg … ho! and even, even the legendary El Dorad … Ronald Kaplan began making strangled laughter noises halfway through, and before Matt Bark could finish he put his head on his desk and moaned, “Oh, my god, oh, my god,” and he wouldn’t look up, even when Mr. Savage yelled at him to stop, and that was it, everyone was laughing, and when Mr. Savage tried to raise Ronald back to a sitting position, Gideon Peel thought we were finally going to get the jujitsu demonstration, and howled, “Flip!”
Mr. Savage took Ronald and Gideon out and stood them in the hall; he came back and told the rest of us, quietly, without anger, that it was good to laugh sometimes, and that it was true, sometimes the things you studied as history were just stories that someone had made up, but the important thing, in this case, was to make up a good story, he didn’t expect us to understand, but he would tell us anyway, that this effort was in some ways the most important thing, more important than memorizing dates or the amendments to the Constitution, and that if we learned anything from him that year, it was that we should try as hard as we could to tell a good story, if we tried hard enough we would get to the truth somehow. No one reminded him that if we learned one thing, it was supposed to be that violence was serious, but we must all have been thinking it.
“The Vikings win,” Mr. Savage said.
I tried to catch his eye, to communicate that it hadn’t been my fault, but he wouldn’t look at me. The Vikings went out to pizza and American history picked up where it had left off. The Puritans were making treaties with the Indians, the French were up to no good in the woods, the Dutch founded schools, among them Nederland, glory, glory be. The story about Admiral Ho got back to Mr. Rye, who was the head of the History Department, and Mr. Rye talked to Mr. Savage, and that was it, there were no more deviations from the textbook. Oh, but I got my revenge: with the help of something the middle-school principal let slip, I figured out how to log in to the school’s accounting system, where I gave Matt Bark and David Metzger each a five-thousand-dollar charge for athletic equipment.
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